Astronautics
Space Events Near You
Upcoming rocket launches sorted by distance from you, plus meteor showers, eclipses, and the ISS — all the space happenings worth looking up for.
Upcoming launches
Nearest first, once we know where you are.
Starship | Starlink Group 31-1 (Starship Flight 14)
Falcon 9 Block 5 | Crew-13
Falcon 9 Block 5 | Transporter 18 (Dedicated SSO Rideshare)
Falcon Heavy | NROL-97
SR75 | Flight 2
Falcon 9 Block 5 | SDA Tranche 1 Transport Layer A
Nuri | NeonSat-2 to 6
Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 15-25
GSLV Mk II | IRNSS-1L (NVS-03)
H3-24 | Martian Moon eXplorer (MMX)
Ariane 64 Block 2 | Amazon Leo (LE-04)
Falcon 9 Block 5 | Bandwagon 5 (Dedicated Mid-Inclination Rideshare)
Falcon 9 Block 5 | Dragon CRS-2 SpX-35
Long March 12A | Flight 2
SSLV | AayulSAT-1A & others
Vulcan VC6L | Amazon Leo (LV-01)
Soyuz 2.1b | Progress MS-36 (97P)
Ariane 62 | Metop-SG B1
Falcon Heavy | Griffin Mission One
HANBIT-Nano | InnoSat-0
Meteor showers
Typical annual peak dates — check the days around the peak for the best rates, away from city lights and moonlight.
Orionids
Radiant: Orion · Parent body: Comet 1P/Halley
Fast meteors, debris from Halley's Comet.
Leonids
Radiant: Leo · Parent body: Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle
Famous for periodic meteor storms roughly every 33 years.
Geminids
Radiant: Gemini · Parent body: Asteroid 3200 Phaethon
Usually the strongest shower of the year, good from early evening.
Ursids
Radiant: Ursa Minor · Parent body: Comet 8P/Tuttle
Minor shower overshadowed by the winter solstice and holidays.
Quadrantids
Radiant: Boötes · Parent body: Asteroid 2003 EH1
Sharp, short peak — best in the few hours before dawn.
Lyrids
Radiant: Lyra · Parent body: Comet C/1861 G1 (Thatcher)
Fast, bright meteors; occasional outbursts.
Eta Aquariids
Radiant: Aquarius · Parent body: Comet 1P/Halley
Best viewed from the tropics and Southern Hemisphere, pre-dawn.
Southern Delta Aquariids
Radiant: Aquarius · Parent body: Comet 96P/Machholz (probable)
Broad, weak peak — decent from the south.
Perseids
Radiant: Perseus · Parent body: Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle
The most popular shower of the year — warm summer nights, high rates.
Eclipses
Upcoming solar and lunar eclipses and where they're visible from.
No upcoming eclipses in the current data set.
International Space Station
For exact visible flyover times at your address, use NASA's Spot The Station.
Astronautics history
The missions that opened up space.
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1957
Sputnik 1 — first artificial satellite
A polished 58-centimeter metal sphere with four whip antennas, Sputnik 1 did little more than orbit the Earth and beep — but that beep, picked up by amateur radio operators around the world, announced that humanity had left the planet for the first time. Its launch stunned the American public and government alike, triggering the 'Sputnik crisis,' a sharp increase in U.S. investment in science education, and directly leading to the founding of NASA less than a year later. Sputnik itself burned up in the atmosphere after three months, but the space race it started would reach the Moon within twelve years.
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1961
Yuri Gagarin — first human spaceflight
Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin launched aboard Vostok 1 and completed a single 108-minute orbit of the Earth before ejecting from the capsule and parachuting to a farm field, where he reportedly startled a farmer and her daughter with his orange spacesuit. Gagarin didn't actually fly the spacecraft — Vostok 1 was almost entirely automated, with manual controls locked behind a code given to him only in case of emergency — but his flight proved a human could survive launch, weightlessness, and reentry. He became an instant global celebrity and a Soviet propaganda triumph in the middle of the Cold War space race.
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1969
Apollo 11 — first Moon landing
With roughly 25 seconds of fuel remaining and its guidance computer flashing overload alarms, the Eagle lunar module touched down on the Sea of Tranquility with Neil Armstrong at the manual controls. Six and a half hours later, he stepped onto the surface, describing it as 'one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.' Buzz Aldrin joined him twenty minutes later while Michael Collins orbited alone in the command module. An estimated 600 million people — roughly a fifth of the world's population at the time — watched the moonwalk live, closing out a space race that had begun with Sputnik less than twelve years earlier.
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1977
Voyager 1 & 2 launch
Launched weeks apart in 1977 to take advantage of a rare planetary alignment, Voyager 1 and 2 flew past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, returning the first close-up images of worlds humanity had only ever seen as points of light. Each carries a Golden Record — a phonograph disc encoded with sounds, images, and greetings from Earth in 55 languages, intended for any spacefaring civilization that might one day find it. Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in 2012, the first human-made object to do so, and both probes are still transmitting data today, over 45 years and more than 15 billion miles from home.
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1981
First Space Shuttle flight
Twenty years to the day after Gagarin's flight, the Space Shuttle Columbia lifted off on STS-1 — the first time a new American spacecraft carried astronauts on its maiden flight, and the first orbital spacecraft designed to be reused rather than discarded after one mission. Commanded by veteran astronaut John Young and piloted by Robert Crippen, Columbia orbited the Earth 36 times before gliding to an unpowered landing on a dry lakebed in California, proving the shuttle could fly, work in orbit, and come home like an airplane. The program would go on to fly 135 missions over 30 years, building the ISS and losing two orbiters and their crews along the way.
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1990
Hubble Space Telescope launch
Hubble reached orbit with a flawed primary mirror, ground to the wrong shape by a fraction of a hair's width — an error that produced blurry images and threatened to make the billion-dollar telescope a punchline. A dramatic 1993 shuttle servicing mission installed corrective optics, effectively giving Hubble glasses, and it went on to become one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built. Its images — from the Pillars of Creation to the Hubble Deep Field, which found thousands of galaxies in a patch of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length — reshaped both astronomy and the public's sense of the universe's scale.
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1998
First ISS module launches
Zarya — Russian for 'sunrise' — was built by Russia but funded by the United States, a fitting start for a station that would eventually involve five space agencies and more than a dozen countries. It launched uncrewed, providing power, storage, and propulsion until later modules arrived. Two weeks later, the Space Shuttle Endeavour delivered the American Unity module and connected the two, forming the first link in what would grow into a football-field-sized outpost. The ISS has been continuously inhabited since November 2000, longer than any other human presence off the planet.
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2020
First commercial crewed orbital flight
Nearly a decade after the Space Shuttle's retirement left NASA paying Russia for rides to the ISS, SpaceX's Crew Dragon Demo-2 carried astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to orbit from the same launch pad Apollo 11 had used. It was the first crewed orbital launch from American soil since 2011, and the first ever by a commercially built and operated spacecraft rather than one built directly by a government space agency. The mission's success opened the door to a new era of commercial crewed spaceflight, with SpaceX now flying routine astronaut rotations to the ISS and private citizens alike.